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These Piledriver based Opterons look competitive but the threat of Ivy-EP is immenient. The last time Intel die-shrunk their High end platform they introduced the monsterous 10 core Westmere-EP(the current Xeon E7 lineup), I wouldn't be surprised Ivy-EP introduces 10/12 core extreme E7 Xeons as well as Octa Xeons with better performance/watt.Reply

Ivy Bridge-E is indeed coming but it is looking to be 6 months out. These Opterons were shipping since November which would give them a 10 month lead time. The real question for AMD is what they'll have in response in that time frame. Steamroller based parts all look to be released in 2014. On the bright side, AMD should be pairing those chips with a new socket as DDR4 becomes available.

One thing though about Ivy Bridge-E is that it will also be a socket 2011 part so migration to it should get relatively quick in comparison to the Westmere-EP to Sandybridge-E transition. The same cost savings for OEM noted in this article for socket G32 Opterons will apply to Ivy Bridge-E this time around.Reply

...is that the 63xx series is focused primarily on micro servers where it fits well. If the just disclosed Jaguar cores are any indication of AMD products to be released this and next year, I'd say AMD is back in the game in many PC and portable markets.

The only thing Ivy Bridge has going for it is reduced power but at a price penalty.Reply

SeaMicro was indeed one of first to use Piledriver based cores, but I don't think the Opteron 6300 is meant to be a "typical" microserver CPU. Otherwise, AMD would have focused more on low power parts. This meant to be an update for the general server market.Reply

You say that AMDs bad implementation of C6 costs them in the energy efficiency tests, but AFAIK with a low of still 10% CPU the CPU should not enter ACPI C3 (Intel C6), it will probably stay in C1e providing there is still more than enough workload to do on each OS tick.

If the xeons are observed to go into ACPI C3, then that is very probably a scheduler optimization specific for intel processors, not an actual implementation problem by AMD. Balancing C-state transitions - especially complete core sleep modes like ACPI C3 - is a notoriously hard task to do because each transition also costs a certain amount of mJ that, on immediate wake, are wasted compared to just leaving the cores in C1(e)Reply

I have dual Opteron 6344 workstation system, which tends to be either near complete idle or near complete busy, so C states are extremely important to me. The CPU has power sensors that are exposed in Linux using the 'sensors' tool. With C6 enabled, I get the power consumption per socket down to 42 Watts, which still seems like a lot, but disabling C6 made it jump to 104W per socket, when under 100% load it is constantly within 1W of the 115W TDP limit.I did not see a significant impact of C1E, neither with C6 enabled nor disabled, presumably because I rarely have cores that are idle for a short period.More annoying to me is the lack of S3 suspend mode, the system still consumes around 100W on S1.Reply

I've been abandoning tech sites due to stupid posters and internet trolls.There is so much addition info and questions in the comments and I don't know why are you letting people ruin that feature from your site?You should make a ranking system(similar to /. ) for users, in order to automatically hide someone's comments, so we don't have to double check every time the poster and/or the comment.

I feel stupid for making that type of comment, also reading specific stupid opinions, below that article.Reply

I like your ideas, however most of the laugh (or should I say cringe?) worthy comments would be hidden and the entertainment value would be tainted by having to click the Show button all the time. ;)Reply

I had meetings and people visiting me, so I could not "baby sit" the reactions. But if you don't react to the offensive message we can delete them. So the best way to deal with th trolls is to ignore. Sooner or later, they will be banned. Reply

You realize that we have no trouble recognizing that you've posted about fifty comments that are essentially incompetent racism against AMD, right?

AMD's processors aren't prefect, but neither are Intel's. And also, AMD, much to your dismay, never announced they were planning to get out of the x86 server market. They'll be joining the ARM server market, but not exclusively. I'm honestly just ready for x86 as a whole to be gone, completely and utterly. It's a horrible CPU architecture, but so much money has been poured into it that it has good performance for now.Reply

Obvious trolling aside, looking at the numbers and its pretty grim. Keep in mind that these are SERVER CPUs. Not only is Intel doing the job faster, its using less energy, and paying a mere $100-$300 more per CPU to cut off on average 20 watts is a no-brainer. These are expected to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no stopping. That power adds up and if AMD has any chance to make any dent in the high end enterprise datacenters they need to push even more.Reply

You must be kidding. TCO is what enterprise looks at and $100-$300 more per CPU in addition to the increased cost of Intel based hardware is precisely why AMD is recovering server market share.

If you do the math you'll find that most servers get upgraded long before the difference in power consumption between an Intel and AMD CPU would pay for itself. The total wattage per CPU is not the actual wattage used under normal operations and AMD has as good or better power saving options in their FX based CPUs as Intel has in IB. The bottom line is those who write the checks are buying AMD again and that's what really counts, in spite of the trolling.

Rory Read has actually done a decent job so far even though it's not over and it has been painful, especially to see some talent and loyal AMD engineers and execs part ways with the company. This happens in most large company reorganizations and it's unfortunate but unavoidable. Those remaining at AMD seem up for the challenge and some of the fruits of their labor are starting to show with the Jaguar cores. When the Steamroller cores debut later this year, AMD will take another step forward in servers and desktops.Reply

Let's assume $0.10 per kilowatt hour. A $100 price difference at 20W would take 1000 kWh, which would take 50,000 hours to produce. The price difference would pay for itself (at $100) in about 6 years.

So yes, the power savings aren't really enough to justify the cost increase. The higher IPC on the Intel chips, however, might.Reply

You're only getting part of the equation here. That extra 20w of power consumed mostly turns into heat, which now must be cooled (requiring more power and more AC infrastructure). Each rack can have over 20 2U servers with two processors each, which means nearly an extra kilowatt per rack, and the corresponding extra heat.

Also, power costs can vary considerably. I was at a company paying 16-17cents in Oakland, CA. 11 cents in Sacramento, but only 2 cents in Central Washington (hydropower).Reply

Well, Intel does pay me and I'll be the first to say these chips are lookin pretty good in comparison with their previous generation counterparts. Good value for the money for sure.

As Anand says, however, HPC users are usually after the "extreme" ends of the scale. They're either after max performance or max performance to fit into a certain power/heat envelope. In either case, we win.Reply

The AMD 6x000 series has always looked nearly competitive on paper but is nowhere near Intel performance and efficiency. We have 3 data centers and one is running a mix of 6100 and 6200 Opterons while the others a re older Xeon 7300s and new E5 Xeons. In terms of single threaded and total performance of the 6x00 series cannot keep up with even old 7300 Xeons and can't touch the E5s. What AMD needs is a 30-40% boost in real world performance before they could be considered competitive. AMD also needs better relations with VMWare to optimize memory management on that platform.

The price difference won't help them as the cost for a data center host is mostly software and can be $15 vCloud and $10K hardware. That reduces the cost advantage to 5% but delivers worse performance and uses more power.

Most data centers are looking to get the most from their VMWare investments while reducing power consumption and these AMDs do neither.Reply

interesting information, but hard to catch if you don't add some figures and real data.

Firsts of all the 7300 series had huge disadvantages with there FSB, so mentioning that these are way faster then the 6100-6200 opteron series is debatable. I 100% tend to disagree and we had severe Vmware performance issues on these machines on our highend applications.

even the 7400 series are a dog against opteron 8000 series and they are way older and slower against the 6000 series.

for the E5 you have a point there, often the E5 series show a higher responsive platform, but once you load real life applications within hypervisor and they are starting to hit those HT cores we have seen several degraded performance within our datacenters, this is not really resulted into the anandtech VAPU's scores due to some sw within the benchmark that provides some code optimised results for the intels (the web servers) hence the higher score.

The 6200 series did showe some response disadvantages but many things have to do with configuration of bios and power profiles in both server and hypervisor. might want to blame the setup rather then the servers. so for 6200 series we actually bought a 10% higher clock speed version to cover that, but reduced that again now with 6300 series.Reply

I'm going to go trawl the internet (note I said trawl, not troll - very important to bear in mind) for articles on FX CPUs resulting in PCs dying... nope, no matches. Funny, huh?

I've also run a search concerning AMD CPUs producing incorrect results and crashing; any such occurrences would be the results of design bugs which, I must point out, are not limited to AMD. Nehalem had a bug causing spurious interrupts that locks up the hypervisor on Windows Server 2008 R2, for example. Core 2 had a huge list of bugs.Reply

It is hard to disagree with the statement, knowing how overpaid US IT professionals are. But I just want to point out that this mentality is one of the reasons IT is being outsourced at a furious rate. Keep that in mind before you go blaming someone else for US jobs being lost.

This meager cost savings may not matter here, but what about some company in Asia? They might actually bite on a few hundred dollar savings, especially if they are ordering quantities in the hundreds. In that case, $300 becomes $30,000. Which might be more than they spend on the people who deploy those servers.Reply

In the article it mentions you were using the E5-2660 CPU (8 core 2.2 GHz) 95W, in a Dell PowerEdge R720 server

It may have been a lot more useful to also have included the E5-2680 (8 core 2.7 GHz) and the E5-2690 (8 Core 2.9 GHz) as while they are 130W parts, they are ones that are often used in the PowerEdge R720 and from what we find in a lot of server sales the higher performance ones are very popular for transactional database servers and payment processing servers.

If you want to go head to head on Intel's top part vs AMD's top part, then it would seem it should be the E5-2690 vs 6386 SEReply

We all know that when you want top performance, Intel is the way to go. So I don't really see the point, even AMD will tell you that the 6376 and 6380 are their most competitive parts.. It is pretty obvious that the E5-2690 2.9 GHz will be faster and consume less than a 6386SE. I don't think our readers really need to see numbers on that.

And I really doubt that the E5-2690 are sold that much. Most reports say that the top bins with the highest TDP are less than 5% of the total sales. Reply

Wow this is about the most gibberish I have seen in a post ever.Good heavens you are an idiot.Let's just tear this post bits so this person will NEVER post on here again.1"No, it's worth per dollar that you have paid to buy Intel based servers. Intel is more reliable because it has Hyperthreading so you can reduce the latencies that will occur in every workloads."Hyperthreading has nothing to do with reliability. So that was a waste of bandwidth."Unlike AMD's engineers who can not design a microprocessor properly. It was AMD's own fault why AMD did not have money like Intel"My I introduce you to Titan http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/titan/ The worlds most powerful computer and powered by AMD cpus. AKA yea I think that AMD can actually do pretty well at designing CPUs so this part of your post is also pure manure."Look 99% Bank's in the world uses Intel based ATM as Intel processor can send information without any error." And here we can see that you understand nothing about digital theory or communications. Again a waste of bandwidth."That is why IBM itself does not use Power based processors for its ATM machine because its CEO has admitted that its engineers are not capable to design a lower power processor. So, IBM uses Intel as the standard processor to exchange information between ATM machine to server, so every digits that sent will come in exact same digits when it has been received."The IBM power line is for high end systems not for ATM machines. Odds are good that many banks use Power based system for handling ATM transactions. IBM uses Intel or AMD because it is cheap and you can get standard boards. As to the every digit sent nonsense. IT IS DIGITAL you MORON. The communications links have error checking and correction not the CPUs. Please NEVER WASTE OUR TIME AGAIN, YOU KNOW NOTHING OF VALUE ON THIS SUBJECT.Reply

"The benchmark shows a rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with results of Intel Core 2 CPU with multi-threading option switched off. "

So that is the reason why the compression MIPS values are in the same order as the decompression. The decompression "MB/s" values are indeed about 10x and more higher than compression. Reply

Can we PLEASE get folding@home benches?! musky on the hardocp forums has come up with a system where you can run repeatable benchmarks. Myself as well as many others would really love to see F@H benches on systems like this!Reply

Because of the way that the current Opteron architecture is (1 FPU per module), did you run with the number of LS-DYNA processes equal to the number of FPUs on chip or did you run it based on per "core" (i.e. 2 processes per module)?Reply

That's a healthy boost! It's amazing how these technologies are maturing to the point where conventional wisdom that they might be starved for FPU resources isn't enough to slow them down.

It'd be interesting to see whether it makes a difference if you were to let the OS handle the job/process scheduling or whether manual intervention can help reduce some of the thread/process migration overhead, especially across 16 FPUs.Reply

Before the benchmarks came in, I looked at an HPC build for the new 6300 series. I saw the real sweet spot for AMD being the 6344 which is a CPU of type 2.6 Ghz @ 12 or 6 core (depending how you define a 'core'). Anandtech never mentioned this CPU in the review. (?)

In simple $ terms for the CPU, it's the E5 2640 @ $815 vs the Opteron 6344 @ $415. So how does AMD not have a decisive price advantage?

In 4S land the price advantage widens.

AMD 4S...I priced a build (not including a case) at ~$3860 for 4 x 6344, 128 GB RAM, mobo and PSU. Note that this mobo could also go out to 256 GB. CPU cost is 4 x 6344 = $1660. Again, total system cost was $3860.

Intel 4S...I picked the 4607 as being the best 'bang for the buck processor'. It's 6 cores @ 2.2 Ghz. However, at $885 per 4607 processor the CPU cost is more than double than AMD (ie 4x Intel 4607 = $3540). The same build cost using the Intel 4607 would then be $5740.

AMD @ $3860 vs Intel @ $5740. Why did Anandtech not talk about 4S? Why no mention of the 6344?Reply

I forgot to mention that the Intel board I specified for 4S build was $1200 whereas the AMD board was $800.

A marketing person would call the system cost comparison ~$3k vs $~6k.

Again, am I missing something?

The AMD 6344 based 4S system has a ~19% clockspeed advantage and comes in at 62% of the cost.

Worried about electrical cost? You can buy 700 watts of PV solar panels with the cost savings between AMD and Intel. 700 watts peak = ~3.5 kwh daily output. That would nicely mitigate (and then some) the 20 watts/cpu difference (80 watts total with 4x cpu) between AMD 6344 and Intel 4607. You would net about 1.5 kwh/day electricity going with the AMD + PV over the slightly more efficient Intel. Reply

this is all and good, but looking at spec int 2006 results, Abu Dhabi still does not match performance/watt of Magni Cours opterons. And the best competition AMd can offer against 2 gen old Xeons is still the Opteron 6180.Reply